Humanitarian Military Interventions: Contested Definitions and Their Consequences for Comparative research

Humanitarian military interventions are widely and controversially debated. Disciplines like International Law, International Relations, and History have produced a sheer endless stream of publications on this phenomenon, recently also under the label of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). This strong academic interest is warranted, given the enduring political importance of the subject. Yet, despite major achievements, the state of the art is still lopsided. Most of the research has focused on the historical roots, legal permissibility, and ethical assessments of humanitarian military interventions. Only few studies have examined who intervenes when and how, or what the consequences of these interventions are. Thus, little is known about the universe of cases, let alone about their characteristics and outcomes. Many historical, legal, and ethical contributions have an ideal type of such endeavours in mind that depicts them as extraordinary events that react to extreme states of emergency and violate basic principles like sovereignty. Thus, these scholars usually offer definitions of humanitarian military interventions that go beyond a conceptual core and include additional aspects to capture their extraordinary nature. The widely agreed conceptual core consists of three elements: the deployment of troops abroad authorised to threaten, or use force (1), for the declared purpose of saving people of the target state (2) who are threatened by a violent emergency (3). The additional aspects include the following definitional elements: in order to be regarded as humanitarian, military interventions must be carried out without the permission of the target state’s government and/or without approval by the United Nations Security Council. Moreover, scholars often insist that the humanitarian purpose must be the only or strongest one and that conscience-shocking crimes must have happened prior to the intervention. Lastly, and not in line with the assumption of humanitarian military interventions as extraordinary, some scholars argue that interventions should be defined as humanitarian in light of their outcomes. The normative research has neither been interested in nor cognizant of the consequences that a certain definition has on the identification of the universe of cases. We argue that such a dialogue between definitional issues and the world of empirical cases points to limits of the overly restrictive definition offered by influential normative research. We use a new dataset on all humanitarian military interventions after the Second World War that we have compiled on the basis of the mentioned core definition to ascertain systematically how definitional decisions affect the universe of cases. This paper demonstrates that adding elements to the core definition yields problematic consequences. An overly restricted definition reduces the universe of cases and ignores the majority of military interventions that have been conducted for declared humanitarian purposes and that have even been classified as such by the majority of the literature. Moreover, the insistence on additional elements is conceptually unconvincing and assigns similar cases to different categories. No higher degree of unit homogeneity compensates for these disadvantages.